Month: November 2015

We have seen some years ago how Salafi Takfiris deceptively took sides in an ethnic conflict in Mali only to then back stab and take over power in Northern Mali, after which the savages rampaged across the territory laying to waste centuries old Sunni mosques, mausoleums and libraries in order to impose Wahhabism. But not before long, Allah Most High brought against them another force and squashed their short lived utopia.

But what is not well known is behind those scenes in reality was a prior ground work that was laid by importing and infiltration of Wahhabism to position of influence, power and fame that gave takfiris the foundation to take over with such ease. One should take heed and realize that while Salafis are a fringe cult they still have money and guns and when moments like this arrives they will actively or passively allow the most extreme Khawarij to take power in order to impose Wahhabism upon Muslims. And there should be no surprise there as the only difference between ultra Wahhabists from Qaeda/Daesh with rest of Wahhabism is on the legitimacy of the Saudi rulers and a couple of recent issues such as the targeting of civilians. Beyond that, Wahhabism of all shades have been for years declaring Sunni Muslims as apostates and pagans and differ with Sunnis from belief in Allah, Tawhid, Iman to much of fiqh, methodology and history of Sunni Muslims, and hence to them it is not of much concern when a slightly more extreme hand was used by their “dear mistaken Salafi brothers” to impose Wahhabism.

We have seen some years ago how Salafi Takfiris deceptively took sides in an ethnic conflict in Mali only to then back stab and take over power in Northern Mali, after which the savages rampaged across the territory laying to waste centuries old Sunni mosques, mausoleums and libraries in order to impose Wahhabism. But not before long, Allah Most High brought against them another force and squashed their short lived utopia.

But what is not well known is behind those scenes in reality was a prior ground work that was laid by importing and infiltration of Wahhabism to position of influence, power and fame that gave takfiris the foundation to take over with such ease. One should take heed and realize that while Salafis are a fringe cult they still have money and guns and when moments like this arrives they will actively or passively allow the most extreme Khawarij to take power in order to impose…

Here he explains the trait mentioned in the hadith about the Khawarij that they read the Qur’an but “do not go beyond their throats” that it means “Neither accepted nor raised are their good deeds“.

In other words, even if the Khawarij read the Qur’an, pray tahajjud, fast every week, fight their self declared “jihad”, or assume about themselves that “at least they have good intentions and calling to Tawhid and Shariah”, it does not matter in light of the religion that Allah has sent down and their deeds are deemed worthless.

And with regards to the description that the Khawarij “pass through the religion”, Imam al-Baghawi explains that “this attribute of the Khawarij is because they denounce the Imams and view people with the sword”.

Here he explains the trait mentioned in the hadith about the Khawarij that they read the Qur’an but “do not go beyond their throats” that it means “Neither accepted nor raised are their good deeds“.

In other words, even if the Khawarij read the Qur’an, pray tahajjud, fast every week, fight their self declared “jihad”, or assume about themselves that “at least they have good intentions and calling to Tawhid and Shariah”, it does not matter in light of the religion that Allah has sent down and their deeds are deemed worthless.

Muslims in Peel Region gathered Sunday to denounce the terrorist attacks in Paris and stress that the extremists’ actions contradict Islamic teaching.

“We feel we need to dismantle the ideology of the terrorists and the extremists,” said Shaykh Faisal Hamid Abdur-Razak of the Islamic Council of Canada, who addressed the more than 200 men and women gathered at The Islamic Forum of Canada in Brampton.

“Islam should not be attached to terrorist activities and we have to find some way to do this. In the media they are described as Islamic terrorists or Islamic extremists. We don’t feel that’s fair because it demonizes and entire community. We need to take away the word Islam from the terrorists… because they are not Muslims. They are terrorists, period.

“Terrorism has no religion.”

The Islamic Forum of Canada, 200 Advance Blvd., extended an official welcome the new Members of Parliament that were part of a Liberal wave that swept into power last month.

Locally, Brampton and Mississauga sent 11 grits to Parliament and were invited Sunday to take part in discussions on some pertinent issues facing Muslims across Canada and the world, including the recent Paris terror attacks that killed 129 people and Syrian refugee crisis.

Community and religious leaders spoke Sunday of the need to build bridges in the community, as well as dispel misconceptions about Islam.

“There are some people that use incidents such as what took place in Paris as a reason to spread hatred about Muslims. This Islamophobia is real. Unfortunately even here in Canada, it has reached us,” said Faisal, a resident of Brampton.

The Liberal Party under leader Justin Trudeau won a decisive victory in last month’s federal election.

The political upheaval in Ottawa saw Canadian Muslims head to the polls en masse to vote out a government many felt promoted fear and divisiveness in favour of openness and greater dialogue.

Mississauga Malton Liberal MP and cabinet minister, Navdeed Bains, addressed some of the backlash directed at Muslims here at home (a Peterborough mosque was set ablaze and women wearing religious garb claimed they were assaulted) and urged Canadians to stand together in solidarity.

“We must not succumb to the politics of fear,” said Bains who praised Canadians for their response to the recent acts of hate targeted at Muslims.

Bains was joined by a number of area grits including Raj Grewal (Brampton East), Iqra Khalid (Mississauga-Erin Mills), Ramesh Sangha (Brampton Centre), and Ruby Sahota (Brampton South).

Brampton Mayor Linda Jeffrey was also on hand.

Canada’s new government has committed to take in thousands of Syrian refugees over the next year with many expected to settle in Peel Region.

Jeffrey and her Mississauga counterpart Bonnie Crombie have offered up help to Ottawa and Queen’s Park in this massive logistical endeavour.

“The Syrian refugee crisis has polarized my community very quickly,” said Jeffrey, who said she’s had to deal with growing resentment in certain circles. She spoke of “racist undertones” that threaten to divide and heighten tensions in the community.

“It’s our responsibility to help those individuals that come here,” Jeffrey said.

Crombie directed regional staff to come up with a comprehensive action plan to coordinate efforts to accommodate the influx of Syrian refugees.

A Nov. 12 motion, endorsed by Peel council, directed staff to report back as soon as possible with an analysis of the Region’s capacity to meet the demand precipitated by the influx of Syrian refugees.

Staff will also report on how the intake of Syrian refugees will affect existing budgets and resources.

Faisal told the crowd many Muslim religious and community organizations have also mobilized to help with resettlement.

Duo invite Russian President Putin to their restaurant in Istanbul following claims in Russian media portraying them as ‘Daesh leaders’

ISTANBUL

Russian President Vladimir Putin is being invited to an Istanbul restaurant run by two Turkish brothers, who have been wrongly accused by Russian media of being Daesh members.

Ismail and Ali Kember have been running a popular restaurant famous for liver recipes in the city’s Fatih district since 2006. A photo of theirs at the restaurant taken alongside Bilal Erdogan, son of Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, has been circulating online for years, and has led to them being referred to as al-Qaeda and Daesh members in an attempt to implicate their guest.

“We are very disturbed by being associated with such groups,” Ali Kember. “Those carrying out these acts of terror are cold-blooded murderers. No one should try to equate us, Muslims, with such people.”

The brothers say Bilal Erdogan is only one of their numerous high-profile customers at Cigeristan, billed on their website as “Istanbul’s most famous liver restaurant”.

They strongly deny claims that they have links to any terrorist group, and are inviting the Russian president to their restaurant so that Putin can “get to know them better.”

“This [news] is circulated in order to cause provocation,” Ali Kember stresses. “Our families are also uncomfortable with the claims. We will pursue legal action if necessary.”

Russian media has recently shared the photo of Erdogan with the owners, describing the duo as “alleged ISIS leaders”.

The media reports come on the heels of an ongoing row between Ankara and Moscow over the downing of a Russian bomber jet after it violated Turkish airspace during a mission Tuesday despite repeated warnings from Turkish authorities.

Putin has described the incident as a “stab in the back” by “terrorist accomplices”, going on to accuse Turkey of buying Daesh oil.

President Erdogan Thursday strongly refuted the claims, calling on the Russian president to show evidence for his allegations.

In Tuesday’s incident, the intruding Russian aircraft was warned about the violation 10 times within five minutes before it was shot down.

It crashed in the Syrian region of Bayirbucak close to Yayladagi district of Turkey’s southern Hatay province.

It was not the first time Russian fighter jets had violated Turkish airspace. In early October, Russian warplanes breached Turkish airspace. Russian officials apologized and pledged that no such incident would be repeated.

Turkey had also renewed its warning on engagement rules, including a military response against violations of Turkish airspace.

No, Miss Liberty of Statue-of-Liberty fame wasn’t always imagined as the scowling, linebacker-throated Midwestern matron of steely spiky Germanic stock that she is today. She was supposed to look like an Arab peasant, robed in the folds of Muslim precepts. She wasn’t even supposed to be eternally standing at the entrance of New York Harbor, warning new arrivals to the New World about New Jersey to her right.

That’s all schoolbook revisionism designed not to traumatize young American pupils with the reality behind Liberty: that she was supposed to be the welcome ma’am at the entrance of the Suez Canal in Egypt, that her name was supposed to be either Egypt or Progress, and that the flame she was brandishing was to symbolize the light she was bringing to Asia, which had claims to newness all its own.

Lighting the Way to Asia

All this from the imaginative scruffles of Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the Alsatian-French sculptor who’d fallen in love with his own Orientalist fantasies about the Middle East after a trip to Egypt’s Luxor spreads in 1855.

He liked Egypt’s colossal sculptures, those “granite beings of imperturpable majesty” with their eyes seemingly “fixed on the limitless future.” He liked just as much the then-fashionable notions of Europeans thinking themselves the “Orient”‘s best thing since unsliced baklava. Bartholdi returned to Egypt in 1869 with the blueprints for a toga-draped giant of a woman who’d double-up as a lighthouse at the entrance of theSuez Canal, which opened that year to fanfare and (British and French) stockholders’ delight.

The Suez Canal may have been in Egypt. But Egypt wasn’t reaping its monetary benefits. The American Civil War had done wonders for Egyptian wealth thanks to the blockade of Southern cotton, which turned Egyptian cotton into gold. But the price of cotton crashed after the Civil War and so did Egypt’s economy. Suez revenue could have picked up the slack. Instead, it went into the pockets of European investors (until Egypt’s Gama Abdel Nasser nationalized the waterway in 1956, to the disingenuous fury of France and Britain).

From Lady Egypt to Lady Liberty

As Bartholdi was sketching one likeness of his great statue after another, it became apparent that his plan would never get Egypt’s financing.

Bartholdi was crushed. He sailed to New York. And there, as his ship was entering New York Harbor, he saw Bedloe’s Island, deserted, oval-shaped, perfectly positioned to bear his creation. She wouldn’t be Egypt. But she’d still be Barthold’s. He worked out an arrangement with Gustav Eiffel to build the statue in 350 pieces in Paris, for the French government to pay for the statue (that was back when French and Americans had more respect than reproach for each other), and with American donors to pay for the 89-foot pedestal. Bartholdi’s goal was to have the dedication coincide with the centennial of the American Revolution, somewhere around July 4, 1876.

It happened a bit later, on Oct. 28, 1886, with a military, naval and civic parade in Manhattan, ending at the Battery at the tip of the island, with Gen. Charles P. Stone, who as the statue’s American engineer, was essentially its midwife, was the parade’s grand marshal. She was no longer an Egyptian woman. She was “Liberty Enlightening the World.”

New York Inaugurates Liberty

The weather did not cooperate. The rain was so bad that a New York Times editorioal called it “almost a national misfortune” that “robbed the pageant of much of its effect.” Not that U.S. President Grover Cleveland was going to miss a chance to make himself slightly immortal by association with Lady Liberty as he accepted “this grand and imposing work of art,” though in words of granite neither grand nor imposing: “This token of the affection and consideration of the people of France assures us that in our efforts to commend to mankind a government resting upon popular will, we still have beyond the American continent a steadfast ally, while it also demonstrates the kinship of the republic.” At that point the historical record notes that there were loud cheers, not least those wondering who wrote that stuff.

But Cleveland got a bit more colorful in his next salvo: “We are not here today to bow before the representative of a fierce and warlike god, filled with wrath and vengeance, but instead, we contemplate our own peaceful deity keeping watch before the open gates of America.” Well, the battleship Tennessee’s warlike batteries, which had just boomed, notwithstanding. “Instead of grasping in her hands the thunderbolts of terror and of death, she holds aloft the light that illumines the way to man’s enfranchisement.” More cheers. Liberty’s light, he concluded, “shall pierce the darkness of ignorance and men’s oppression until liberty shall enlighten the world.”

Egypt Forgotten

Of Egypt’s inspiration in all this, not a word. The majority of the hundreds of thousands of immigrants from the Middle East, Egyptians among them, would never know the statue’s genesis, only their own. And their own, to this day (even though they’ve long ago stopped sailing into New York Harbor as immigrants), remains one mired in the authoritarian, unfree grasp of regimes from the Hindu Kush to West and North Africa that have yet to see the light Cleveland spoke of, and Bartholdi imagined.

One last irony: Bedloe’s Island was not officially renamed until many years later, when it became Liberty Island. The year? 1956. Gamal Abdel Nasser must have smiled.